by Delfino Muñiz

I want to take you back to the 1970’s in a small neighborhood in Compton, California. I was a barefoot kid running up and down the street, laughing with my friends, chasing the ice cream truck, not a care in the world. We were brown and black kids, full of energy and dreams. We didn’t know we were growing up in what others called the ghetto. To us it was just home. Our innocence didn’t last for many of us. For me, my innocence ended in 1987. I was just fifteen-years-old when I watched my fourteen-year-old friend take his last breaths, killed by gun violence. That moment changed everything for me.

The kid I used to be disappeared the day my friend died. I was left confused, scared, angry, lost, and eventually vindictive and self-destructive. I carried the pain of his death for decades. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t know I could ask for help, and no one offered. That moment of trauma changed my worldview for the next thirty-three years of my life. I made a series of bad decisions. And now, I write to you from a prison where I’m serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole for causing the same pain and trauma I experienced.

In 2020, after almost two decades of pain, I finally found the courage to face my trauma. I got help. I did the hard work of healing. With understanding, self-forgiveness, prayers, and compassion, I began the journey to redemption. And for the first time in many years, I met the version of myself I thought was lost forever. Today, in 2025, now I hear about a twelve-year-old child named Rodrigo Emiliano Martinez, in Compton, whose life was taken by a seventeen-year-old. Again, through gun violence. My heart broke all over again because I see myself in that seventeen-year-old. And I see my best friend in that twelve-year-old. So I ask myself, when does the cycle stop? How many more? How many kids have to die before we realize we are losing two lives with each incident? One to the grave, the other to prison. I didn’t get help after watching my friend die. Nobody showed up to help either. Nobody told me it was okay to cry. To talk. To heal.